This has worked for political activism (e.g. Egypt), natural disasters (Christchurch NZ, and Japan earthquakes), and also of course for academic events like conferences! Attach conference tag to your tweet; search the tag for more tweets about the same event. Examples Some tags: In August 2011, my blog moved to the University Affairs site where I now post about once a week. Excellent "starter's guide" to Twitter for researchers, by Martin Eve @martin_eve http://prezi.com/beqjtk5qhxcs/using-twitter-for-research/ RSS is used to "feed" articles from different web sites into one convenient page ("reader") so that you can aggregate news according to your interests. Example: Google reader http://goo.gl/vpdjz http://www.diigo.com/index Example: Social bookmarking with Diigo social bookmarking sites allow you to create an online account & save links to it from any compter, anywhere. In addition, you can tag your links to keep them in order, & share them with others. A tool added to your browser allows you to save & tag links, & share them (on Twitter as well), as you find them. http://www.scribd.com/ Example: Document sharing with Scribd On Scribd you can upload documents and share with others on and off the site. You can also organize documents into "collections". Example: Searching & saving tweets with Storify Example: Example: Photo sharing with Flickr Example: sharing presentations with Prezi Example: Saving & sharing maps with Google Maps http://markcarrigan.net/2012/02/01/why-do-you-find-twitter-useful-as-an-academic/ http://salmapatel.com/academia/prezi-10-ways-researchers-could-use-twitter Many first-time users of Twitter give up on it after a limited period of use. But Twitter is a tool that becomes more interesting and useful over time, as you engage in regular interaction with other users. Twitter's interface doesn't "show" you how things actually work. Tweets might look nonsensical at first, but you can soon learn the "language" of Twitter by watching what others do. on Twitter: